How World War II Began
Added 2024-04-11 13:07:42 +0000 UTCHey everyone, I thought I'd make a post here as a sort of debrief from the last video (How World War II Began).
It's a subject that's been on my mind (as it has been for many) since Russia began its war with Ukraine, and I wanted to make something that put the dynamics down on the table in a clear way for everyone to see. It ended up taking around 8 months to make and was easily the most trying experience so far for me as a creator.
I originally wanted it to be around 40 minutes long, but then realized I should probably go into detail about the Paris Peace Conference and the League of Nations, and also should probably go into detail about the spread of communism, rise of Fascism, Nazism, and also go into detail about the rise of aggressor states and failure of the League of Nations and appeasement as a policy. That all took a lot of research and synthesizing it into a tight piece was not easy.
I've spent the last 10 days or so starting my next project, but I thought I'd come back here and post this and say hi.
Looking forward this is what I'm seeing:
1) Another Patreon video (I want to cover the Nazi Olympics even though I understand there isn't a huge amount of anticipation for that. I think it will be good!)
2) A video called 'America's Leadership Problem.' It's a bit abstract and I've read three books so far as I try to figure out the angle and form of it, but it seems like a timely subject to loop back into U.S. politics for a bit.
3) 'Why Russia Isn't a Democracy' - Probably the upcoming video I'm most excited about.
4) Something on Iran. I have a couple ideas, just need to pick the one that seems most appropriate.
I also want to cover North Korea but it seems like I keep kicking that can down the road as other subjects seem more pressing.
That's it for now. Hope you guys enjoyed the most recent vid and let me know if you have any thoughts/comments/questions/concerns/anything to add or bring to my attention.
Also of course thank you as always, from the bottom of my heart, for your support. I literally could not have made that last video without the support here. Without your support I would have needed to have pushed it out months earlier (in whatever form it was in) or would have had to divide my time by working another job. Thank you. I'm currently what they call 'all-in' on this work and do not want that to change.
- Ryan
Comments
This video is godsent. I listen to it on loop nearly every night for the past 3 months ish. The only thing I can fall asleep to for the time being. Nearly memorized the whole thing, as I have episodes I get woken up in the middle of the night and listen to a 5/10 min chunk then the circle repeats. Have you considered creating a piece on "Vietnam War". Since you took Aldolf Hitler angle for this. Could be interesting to drill into Henry Kissinger involvement in Bombing innocent people in Cambodia and Laos. The man who hated the Nazis and fled Germany ended up doing the same thing kinda, food for thought. Mr Kissinger gets overlooked for the human cost he was responsible for. I am not very educated in this conflict Thanks for the WW2 piece
purpose
2025-01-17 01:02:50 +0000 UTCThis. Just joined to say thanks. Now is the time to heed the warning.
Hartmut Koerner
2024-05-05 00:46:49 +0000 UTCThanks for your support! And I'm glad the video helped you flesh things out.
Ryan Chapman
2024-04-30 19:05:16 +0000 UTCNew member here coming by to say thanks for the video. I knew many historical facts mentioned in the video, as WW2 has been scarily fascinating topic for me for years, but this video summarises them greatly, thus allowing to recognise many parallels to today's international moods...
Albert
2024-04-30 18:24:56 +0000 UTCOne can see the effort you put into the video. Gave me chills.
Knobitobi
2024-04-15 16:23:41 +0000 UTCFantastic - so grateful for your brain and delivery.
Critical Thinker
2024-04-14 17:34:53 +0000 UTCId love to see you do a video comparing American political leadership to Chinese political leadership. Their different philosophies, worldviews, and how they make decisions
Casey Smith
2024-04-14 03:16:52 +0000 UTCI just meant to say that I was operating with a different definition of right wing from Ryan, the quote I shared, while not academically high brow isn't mean to advocate for exhaustive definitional clarity, it's highlighting that many disagreements are resolved by engaging a critical point of miscommunication. In this instance, it's likely that I was perhaps wrong because I was engaging with a colloquial definition. Ryan's clarification communicated to me that right wing, in this sense means in opposition with classically left wing positions. So that fits with what seems obvious to me that politics is multidimensional despite common usage of a flat left right dichotomy that can lead to erroneous associations between ideologies.
Kaerakh
2024-04-12 16:56:54 +0000 UTCIt seems to me that this debate between Popper and Wittgenstein represents two different ways of approaching how humans communicate and understand the world. Some personality types prefer defining things precisely for an analytical understanding while others prefer fluid definitions and working their way to an intuitive understanding. I think both of these approaches are needed and complementary, but a lot of conflict comes from interactions between people that use opposing approaches and are for some reason or another unwilling to accept the other approach as valid. I suspect most of the time it's just due to not understanding the other approach. I was hoping to write a bit more about these approaches, but ... as usual, whenever I try, I write a lot, but end up erasing most of it.
Elriel
2024-04-12 15:19:44 +0000 UTCI am responding to the reference about the lifelong conversation that turned science on its ear.
Moreen Carvan
2024-04-12 11:31:13 +0000 UTCIf I’ve missed this in your work, I hope you’ll repost!
Moreen Carvan
2024-04-12 11:29:20 +0000 UTCHave you considered an in-depth framing of thought about scientific explanation and its powerful but largely unrecognized impact on political discourse? Popper, Feyerabend, Wittgenstein…they cared so deeply about the discourse because, to them, it defined the limits of human capacity to know or understand anything.
Moreen Carvan
2024-04-12 11:28:46 +0000 UTCVery nice work. I'm glad you took the extra time and length to fill out the precursors; it made it all the more interesting. As I watched, I thought of similarities to today, too: Hitler to Putin; Nazi to Russian state media propaganda to MAGA private media propaganda; Fascism to Trump cultism; British appeasement policy to strategically weak American and European policy - none of which is an exact likeness, but loose. As an aside, I grew up in conservative circles, where 'liberal' and 'Satan' were nearly synonymous. When I drifted to the middle, some of my old friends started cursing me online with the L-word. I wanted to be considered centrist, but they wouldn't have it. You made me realize they were right, although not in the sense they imagined. I am liberal, not radical left, as they thought, but in the middle, as I conceive of myself. Good, old-fashioned liberal democracy liberal. I knew progressivism is to the left of liberalism, but I didn't know liberalism was in the middle. Thank you for letting me own that as a label for myself.
Tim Elston
2024-04-12 06:15:06 +0000 UTCExcited!
Kartik Nalamalapu
2024-04-12 03:53:38 +0000 UTCExcellent Ryan, truly excellent.
Michael Fortier
2024-04-11 18:40:36 +0000 UTCHow did I miss this on youtube?!?! Awesome video so far
BrazGhost
2024-04-11 17:11:39 +0000 UTCCongratulations again on publishing How World War II Began. It's eloquent, informative, circumspective, and tidy. While I'm looking forward to the list of topics, I've been giving a bit of thought to the prospect of a Russian Representative Democracy as a continuation of an existing oligarchy without the international-institutional drawbacks of dictatorship.
Jared Fry
2024-04-11 15:18:19 +0000 UTCThanks for sharing it with friends! Also glad you enjoyed it and saw relevance.
Ryan Chapman
2024-04-11 14:53:17 +0000 UTCThanks! Also nothing against Adam and Sitch but there was also a famous career-long debate about that between Karl Popper and Ludwig Wittgenstein. Wittgenstein held that we could definitively know just about everything if we were precise enough about our definitions, and Popper held that trying to form definitions leads to fighting and that one should avoid definitions as much as possible to avoid fighting and stay productive.
Ryan Chapman
2024-04-11 14:49:24 +0000 UTCLoved the WWII video. Watched it with some friends who were unfamiliar with your work. High praise all around. Well worth the wait. The similarities in the root causes for rise of fascism, nationalism, the bolsheviks is interesting. All still relevant for today.
Bill Lanza
2024-04-11 14:44:40 +0000 UTClol Yes, Sitch and Adam have a jokingly referred to as "Sitch's Law" adage. Which states that the vast majority of disagreements are disagreements over definitions. Anyways appreciate your time, I think your work is excellent and very beneficial.
Kaerakh
2024-04-11 14:44:40 +0000 UTCOkay great! It's funny how one can just list facts and recite history all day, and it's fine, but when we try to organize politics into categories there's always intense disagreement/confusion/mess. Also yes, I think most of what we discussed here is commonly misunderstood. We understand the left well enough, but I think the right is poorly understood. Especially when it comes to nationalism and fascism.
Ryan Chapman
2024-04-11 14:38:04 +0000 UTCYes, you're correct, I was assuming being right wing and conservative would go hand in hand. If you disassociate them and swap it out with pure nationalism, I don't have disagreement at all. I may be unique in or uncommon in my misunderstanding of that, but it could be worth investigating if that's a common misunderstanding.
Kaerakh
2024-04-11 14:33:22 +0000 UTCI think (but could be wrong) that what's going on here is you're assuming the right has to be conservative. It could be conservative, but it could also be nationalist. Those nationalists do not have to be conservative at all. American conservatives might be liberal in the general view of history (if you're a bit selective where/when you look), but American nationalists and fascists are not necessarily conservative. They can be forward-looking and just generally divorced from the conservative tradition and still count as right-wing for being nationalist/fascist. I don't understand why you can't divorce the American right from economic policy. Some Americans may be right-wing because of their economic views, but there's nothing special about the U.S. saying the right end of the spectrum has to be based on economics.
Ryan Chapman
2024-04-11 14:29:21 +0000 UTCSure, I really appreciate the response, and no worries if you would rather not get bogged down in a back and forth. My concern is exactly what you said that I agree with, that conservatism more or less wants to hold onto and preserve traditions and existing culture. The US context is fairly unique in that it's specifically liberal and in not small parts anti-authoritarian. In this sense while it maybe traditional to associate fascism with the right and even largely accurate in Europe, I have a concern that applying this universally without qualifier adds to the confusing definition of right wing that exists in the US. I can divorce fascism from economic policy for fairly obvious reasons to both you and me, but I can't divorce the American right as easily or maybe even at all with economic policy. In this sense the association seems messy, and you and I may know and even possibly accept it to be conversational, but the question becomes, does this actually communicate your meaning correctly to an American viewer, regardless of political preference, that may be operating with a flatter more tradition set of definitions? I think there's a potentially high error rate there.
Kaerakh
2024-04-11 14:15:33 +0000 UTCConservatism is going to be different everywhere. The point is that it's based in tradition and wanting to uphold, preserve, or even move society back towards those traditions. Traditions are going to be different everywhere. They're all on the right end of the spectrum, regardless of where you are (Iran, the U.S. or Germany). So we could get into differences, but it doesn't change the underlying graphical point. Does that make sense? I'm also not sure I understand your point about fascism. It's not tied to economics or conservatism. It's just tied to nationalism, specifically a hierarchical view of nationalism (your own nation is great and deserves priority and even supremacy over others). It's just the standard way we have developed to label it for the sake of being able to talk about politics coherently. Communism is that extreme form of socialism (making it far left), fascism is the extreme form of nationalism (making it far right).
Ryan Chapman
2024-04-11 14:02:11 +0000 UTCSo in my view, (I identify myself usually as a slightly left leaning moderate atheist) the American conservative position has to be contextualized in its liberal/libertarian traditions. In this sense what is right wing in America is very different from what is right wing in Europe. Recent popularist trends in the US obviously make this blurrier, but I tend to be cautious, specifically when I think an American perspective may be applied, associating fascism with the right. As the left right dichotomy in the US is also more economic. Fascism being not economically focused makes it not map as well. In a European context I think your definition and presentation is fine though as the European conservative context has non-liberal traditions to draw from. I'm more just saying I don't think the US has the same traditions and history that make fascism likely as it would for a country with a history of monarchism. Hopefully that clarifies what I was thinking.
Kaerakh
2024-04-11 13:50:49 +0000 UTCHey, yes sorry I think I did miss it in the comments section. I have used a triangular model in other videos to show that liberalism is separate from conservatism or progressivism, but it was still on a left-right diagram. You can just flatten the triangle, assume people understand that that people can embody one term on a particular side of the chart without needing to embody the others, and you get the same result. It's also just the basic understanding that is the most universal one we have in the world today (socialism on the left, nationalism on the right, progressivism on the left, conservatism on the right, liberalism in the middle). What's there to be confused about? I'm also not sure I get your last point on American conservatism in relation to the graph. Can you elaborate?
Ryan Chapman
2024-04-11 13:39:58 +0000 UTCI left a comment that probably got lost in the youtube comments, I think there's some potential for confusion to be created from your work with your use of the left right spectrum in this video vs how you've previously used a more triangular model to describe American politics. Given the US's unique context that its conservatism exists in in comparison to European entities.
Kaerakh
2024-04-11 13:22:46 +0000 UTC
